Children of the Day

by Sandra Birdsell

  The name Aubigny had jumped out at her. She took hold of what was familiar, leaned forward in the seat to interrupt him. To tell Oliver that she knew of Aubigny. Her brother-in-law’s farm wasn’t far from there, and a sister sold eggs and cream in that town, and in Union Plains, too. Had he heard of Union Plains?

  For sure, yes, he was acquainted with the place. A nice little town. It appeared as though he might say more, but decided against it.

  There’s going to be a cheese factory built at Union Plains, Sara told him, eager to push their conversation forward. To show him that she’d recovered, convey that the near accident hadn’t been as serious as all that.

  You don’t say, Oliver replied, as though she’d said something important and interesting.

  He sounded different from most Canadians she’d met, his voice husky and full of air. He grasped the wheel lightly, with hands that were almost dainty, and so unlike the broad and scarred hands of a farmer.

  What brought you to Winnipeg? he asked.

  I came to work, she told him. Like everyone else, she thought. The clerks she sometimes dealt with in the stores. Like them, she rinsed her stockings at night and hung them to dry, but unlike them, she did not have to choose what she would wear, could not anticipate any lively chatter in the lunchroom, or in the restrooms where they tidied their hair and freshened their faces and talked about—what? Where they would go after work? Who they might see? She really didn’t know.

  Nevertheless, she was riding in a taxi and having a conversation with a man. A person who didn’t ask her to repeat herself. Who hadn’t started in surprise when she spoke and then become wary and distant, or treated her like a child, raising his voice and choosing his words carefully. The street unfolded in its familiarity, and beyond she saw the shining white rump of the horse on the saddlery store sign.

  You don’t say, Oliver said once again. And where do you work?

  I work at the Hudson Bay store, she heard herself tell him, and for the moment it took to speak it seemed true. He sat up straighter and she saw his dark eyes looking at her in the rear-view mirror, appraising, approving.

  As they drew up in front of the boarding house, Oliver turned to her, indecision working in his face. Say, I wonder. Do you like picture shows?

  I don’t know, she said, answering without thinking and revealing that she’d never been to one.

  There was a flutter of movement in the curtain on a window at the boarding house. Oliver got out of the car and she resisted the impulse to open the door, waiting for him to do so. She had thought Oliver was tall, but now, as she stepped from the taxi, she realized he was medium height. Her mouth quivered as she said, My name is Sara Vogt. His teeth were the colour of old ivory, and wet, and when he smiled at her they shone.

  The door opened quickly to Sara’s ring, and she attributed the startled expression of the hostess of the Home Away from Home Club to the fact that she was so late. Then she realized that the woman was staring at her ears. Without thinking, Sara brought her hands up and touched her lobes, which were numbed by the clamp of metal. From the curb came the sound of the car’s horn tooting, and she turned to see Oliver wave as he drove off. The woman’s shock gave way to disapproval as she took note of him.

  Well, yes. You’re here at last. We wondered and wondered what could have happened. What’s keeping our Sara? The woman’s veneer of concern did little to conceal the chilliness of her tone.

  Sara entered to the buzz of conversation and laughter coming from the living room. For an instant she thought, Take off the earrings, the scarf. She would enter their presence as plain and as unadorned as they were. The odour of coffee brewing seeped out from the kitchen at the end of the hall. She was in time for the customary mid-afternoon lunch of cheese and buns, for more depressing stories.

  Our Sara has arrived, the hostess announced at the living-room doorway, loudly, as though giving the women a warning.

  When Sara told Oliver about what she had seen falling from the sky on the day he had almost mowed her down with the taxi, he suggested that it had been a bat. Her description included pantomime when her English failed, her hands moving in counter-circles in the air. You can’t predict the movement of a bat, and they’re quick as a wink, he said. More than likely, that’s what you saw.

  Cigarette smoke streamed from his nostrils as he exhaled; then he crushed the cigarette out in an ashtray resting on the arm of the sofa where they sat, in his brother Romeo’s tiny living room somewhere in St. Boniface, on a short street of rundown houses. A street that ended near a large stone cathedral, and the muddy banks of the Red River.

  I’ve seen bats, Sara said. In that other place, while she was being carried on her father’s shoulders across a compound towards a lit-up house, the hair on the top of her head had lifted, and a bat had dipped down on the path in front of them and disappeared into the twilight. Bats were suddenly present, and suddenly gone. She’d seen bats when she brought Kornelius’s cows to water at the dugout pond, and their flight was an erratic swerving and darting, not at all like what she’d seen falling towards her from the sky. But she didn’t tell him that. She did not say to Oliver, Don’t tell me what I saw, as she would do after they were married. Don’t tell me what I meant to say.

  Well then, maybe a pigeon, Oliver responded.

  No, no, no, Sara said, shaking her head. The wings were larger, and transparent. She struggled to say more, while seated beside him on the sagging couch in Romeo’s rundown house, rain pinging against the tin roof, twin boys romping in a crib in the bedroom beyond, causing the crib to bang against the wall. She wanted to tell Oliver that she’d come close to dying once before. But she was quieted as his hand came near her face, his fingers combing through his hair and releasing a scent that reminded her of the smell in the air when the train taking her to their ship neared the ocean.

  She was wearing the silk stockings of a dead sister on that train trip, the flesh-coloured hosiery folded down and drawn tight around her scrawny girl thighs with large wool stitches. The pucker of material, the grasp of garters, was noticeable through her skirt. Throughout the long journey the stockings kept twisting, and they rumpled like a second skin at her knees. Sara had left that sister, her four brothers and her parents behind in their graves. The train crept through the Russian border and into Lithuania, a drawn-out moment that went on longer than Sara was able to hold her breath, while all around her people broke into song and weeping.

  She breathed Oliver in, aware of the crepe of her dress shifting as she moved closer to him, its weight like water sliding across her stomach and thighs. My brother’s having a small get-together, Oliver had said to her earlier in the evening, when he met up with her at the Bay store entrance. She had expected that they were going to go to a movie, as he’d suggested, as an apology of sorts for having come near to running her down. She’d told Mrs. Ashburn that was where she’d be, and with a friend, neglecting to say that the friend was male.

  Romeo studied them from across the room as he leaned forward on a kitchen chair, a burning cigarette in the fingers of one long hand. Oliver’s usual easygoing self had been trimmed and spiffed. He looked uncomfortable in a new shirt and tie, his boots shined to the limit and planted on the floor as though he needed to feel it beneath him.

  Sara was small, and she was pretty, as Oliver had said. Her face was unblemished, and even without the benefit of makeup her skin glowed, as did her eyes as she took in the room. Her quickness brought to mind the fluttery movements of a finch, but there was nothing flashy about her that would have caught Romeo’s eye if he had passed her on the street. Her jitteriness, the heavy material of her dress, its tailored and carefully pressed appearance, made her look like a convent-school girl about to give a piano recital, and having a case of the butterflies.

  Sara thought Romeo seemed to have a fire going inside him, the way his features flared one moment and darkened the next. He went from silent laughter, as he listened to her and Oliver talk, to guarded puzzlem
ent. He didn’t seem to understand much of what she said, and when the brothers spoke French she tried to guess from their expressions, the movements of their bodies, what they were saying.

  Dishes clattered in the kitchen, where Romeo’s wife, Claudette, prepared food for the guests they were expecting. Likely there’s going to be music, Claudette had said, and chuckled at the thought. Her nostrils were slits, not holes, and her voice was squeezed thin. She’d worked for a longer time at Canada Packers than Romeo, filling boxes on the conveyors. It was a coveted job, and therefore there were more English girls than French ones working with her. As a result, Claudette’s English was better than her husband’s.

  After the guests arrived, Oliver and Romeo spoke French for the remainder of the evening. The small house quickly filled, became jammed with bodies, and the air blue with smoke so thick Sara could barely breathe. Cheers went up when a small wiry man with a thin black moustache arrived carrying a violin case, soon followed by another fiddler. Within moments, out came a lively jig that stopped all conversation.

  People’s smiles grew wide, were almost conspiratorial, as though they’d agreed beforehand to become devil-may-care and comfortably soused. Sara was a dull spot sitting on the couch, not knowing where to look, wearing a dress gussied up with a limp-looking scarf knotted at her breasts.

  These men and women from St. Boniface were meat-plant workers, Canada Packers being a major employer for people lacking in education. But they’d educated themselves in a more necessary way than what might be found in books. They knew how to be flamboyant, to spend the money they worked so hard to earn. They played the horses until their pockets were empty. Went dancing at the Belgium Club and flirted with each other’s spouses, attended mass at the cathedral the following day, bleary-eyed, contrite, a handshake forgiving a bruised chin, a woman blushing to recall the illicit caresses of the man now standing in line in front of her, waiting to receive the body and blood of Christ.

  Alice Bouchard arrived near the end of the evening. The music stopped and the room grew still as the door closed behind her. Alice swept a green cape from her shoulders and gave it to Claudette, as though this were the reason why she had rushed to the door. Alice was petite and small-boned, and more polished-looking than the other women present. Her eyes found Oliver and Sara seated on the couch, and her smile seemed forced as she came to greet them. A cloud of sweet-smelling scent wafted from her as Oliver rose to meet her, and to receive her kisses, first one cheek and then the other.

  How do you do, Alice said, greeting Sara in English, in a tone that sounded as though she was withholding laughter. Her olive eyes grazed Sara’s face and her body once, and then she ignored her for the remainder of the evening.

  Who is she? Sara asked Oliver, as Alice went away from them.

  She’s an old friend from my school days, from Aubigny, Oliver replied.

  Sara grew quietly agitated as the hours passed by. Close to midnight she said to Oliver a second time, I have to go, and got to her feet, thinking that she felt the others sigh in relief as she did so.

  Oliver walked her to a taxi stand and insisted on paying the driver to take her home. And so she had her second and last ride ever in a taxi, speeding through the streets, the houses all along the crescent like dark sentinels, until the taxi drew near to the Ashburn residence, whose front entrance was lit.

  This just won’t do, Sara Vogt, Emily Ashburn called to her as she went up the stairs at the back of the house. Proper girls don’t come home at such an hour.

  Not long afterwards, Katy and Kornelius arrived at the Ashburn house to fetch Sara, Katy’s face grey with disappointment. She didn’t speak the entire drive to the farm. They entered the house and the children scattered like chickens in a barnyard, Annie’s eyes filling as she came from the kitchen to greet Sara and was stopped short by a pointed look from Kornelius. Immediately Kornelius made Sara sit down on a chair, as though he meant to interrogate her, the cuckoo bird in the wall clock shooting out from its door to count the hour.

  For a moment Sara thought Kornelius would strike her, and steeled herself against it. Go ahead, do it, she thought. Let me feel the sting of your hand against my face, something more than disappointment, the feeling she had of falling backwards.

  Take the silver spoon out of your mouth, Kornelius said. It doesn’t belong there. He would finish paying off the passage fees, he said, and in return she would help Katy raise the children, and take on more of the farm chores, now that Annie would be attending high school in the nearby town of Steinbach.

  High school? she did not ask. Why had she been given only two years and Annie got to go to high school? Katy had retreated to the kitchen and began to sing now, her voice filled with vibrato; Kornelius left the house, slamming the door behind him. She would run away, put on her coat, boots, and go running for the road. And go where? Into the kitchen to help prepare the meal. She felt numbed, her feet heavy. But she entered the kitchen singing, When the moon shines over the mountain. Katy, beautiful Katy, I’ll be waiting at the kitchen door. She sang merrily a song she’d often heard playing from the Ashburn’s’ radio, and drowned out her sister’s hymn.

  She became a prisoner of winter then, the long cold months that stretched endlessly into a white horizon without the relief of a city unfolding beyond the front door. She remembered hearing Katy once say that their grandparents had died of heartsickness, disappointment coupled with a loneliness that had no foreseeable end. In the old country her grandparents had lived in a town while farming the lands beyond. In Canada there was nothing to see for miles around and nowhere to walk, no neighbours they could visit at the end of the day, they complained, albeit apologetically, not wanting to risk sounding ungrateful. Sara understood their loneliness now. It was like a voice echoing from a deep stone well.

  Winter isn’t any colder this year, Katy said, as she and Sara hung laundry on lines strung through the attic of the farmhouse. Meaning it was no colder than the previous four winters Sara had already experienced in Canada. Sara’s knuckles were bleeding, chapped as rough as a rasp, and paining with the cold. Four winters of hanging clothes out to dry in the bitter cold had permanently curled two of Katy’s fingers, but still she only resorted to using the inside lines when the temperatures dipped below minus twenty. On a recent frigid day, Sara’s niece, Susan, had drawn her outside to watch as she threw a cup of hot water into the air, delighting in the spectacle of water instantly turning to snow.

  Winter makes me lonely, Sara said, speaking round a lump in her throat as she pinned a bedsheet to a line in the attic. When the clothing dried, she would need to bundle up once again, come up here to the wind-racked top floor, whose boards were thick with frost, and put the bedding, towels, tablecloths through the mangle.

  Lonely for what? Katy asked, worrying that city life had got into Sara’s blood. The rafters shuddered as the wind pelted snow against the house.

  I met a man in Winnipeg, his name is Oliver, Sara blurted, wanting to make him real by speaking his name. She sometimes thought she’d imagined him and the failed party at Romeo’s house. She’d returned the earrings to Emily Ashburn’s dressing-table drawer, but kept the scarf, a reminder of the events when she had worn it, the freedom she had had to go about the city as if she was a normal everyday person.

  And? Katy asked.

  Sara sensed her immediate and careful attention.

  I think he was fond of me, Sara said recklessly. Would Oliver have taken her to meet his brother if that weren’t so? And I’m fond of him too, she said, thinking of the poem she’d copied from a shop window. Oliver, for a short time, had been her beau, her intended, my financier, she thought, meaning fiancé.

  So that’s it, Katy thought, relieved once again to have brought Sara home.

  Spring finally dawned, bringing sleet pellets that stung Sara’s face as she dashed between the car and the church; then a week of freezing rain glazed the remaining shreds of snow and made the roads treacherous. Soon after, pools of w
ater collected on the fields, and Sara looked out the window one morning and saw a pair of mallard ducks flying above the dugout pond.

  Katy attributed Sara’s restlessness to having lived in Winnipeg; she’d been spoiled by its commotion and noise. She’d become a person who needed to be entertained, who liked to see herself in a mirror and hear herself talking. It would be good for Sara to be married, and soon, she concluded, failing to realize that Sara sought confirmation that she was alive. She had no sooner experienced joy at being among the living than that joy had been thwarted.

  Her conclusion that Sara should marry was confirmed the following summer, during a get-together of several women from church. Come and visit us for a change, Katy had framed her invitation. It will do us all good. They would have a songfest in the way they used to amid the walnut grove in the old country.

  The women arrived all together, six of them, spinsters and widows nearing middle age, driven to the farm by one of the women’s nephews, Henry Friesen, a young man who was the son of a watch repairer from the large Mennonite town of Steinbach. While the women went off for their songfest, he stayed to visit with Kornelius under the open veranda he’d built onto the back of the house so that Katy might watch twilight descend, the children playing while she shelled peas, the cows coming to the dugout to drink. The fair young man was pleasantly stout and boyishly handsome, and Sara didn’t fail to notice him.

  The women went through the field of blooming wild mustard, whose garishly bright flowers would have hurt their eyes had it not been for myriads of white butterflies, a confetti of flitting wings rising in a billow as the women made their way to the elm tree and the blankets Katy had spread down in its shade.